


Champagne Wishes

by likeadeuce



Category: Iron Man (Comic), Marvel, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-07
Updated: 2010-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 19:12:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/pseuds/likeadeuce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the best relationships begin with window-shopping in the liquor store on Valentine's Day Night.  Obviously.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Champagne Wishes

Emma watches as one of the tiny red lights in the window display flickers, then blinks out. Symbolic, she thinks bitterly, hugging arms to her cold chest. The glowing string, looped in a heart shape around the giant plastic champagne bottle, promises holiday joy to new and old lovers alike. But by some time after eight o'clock on the fourteenth of February, when you find yourself standing on the sidewalk outside a liquor store, shivering in a trenchcoat over clothes that weren't exactly designed for warmth and comfort –- by that time, Emma decides, the bloom is off of the Valentine rose.

The bell on the front door jingles. "Are you going out or coming in?" snaps an unfamiliar voice. Emma jerks her head up to see the door being held by a man with "Uptown Liquors" and "OMAR" stitched on to his shirt. She is ready with a tart response – is a man with a nametag honestly telling Winston Frost's daughter where she can stand? -- when she realizes that the question isn't addressed to her.

"Sorry," says a gruff, low voice. The man is standing a few feet to her left, almost in the doorway. He has a fedora pulled half-down his forehead, scarf and collar raised to obscure his face. "I was just –" He gestures at Emma. "Ladies first," and what is she going to say? _No thank you, I'll just stand here and wish I had money for a bottle of champagne that I wouldn't drink anyway, because I have to go pretend to dance for a horde of lewd men, and I can't afford to let down my psychic defenses?_

"Thank you," she murmurs, and walks inside, taking advantage of the warmth. She thinks about shoplifting; hiding something inside her trenchcoat would be easy enough. Hell, if it came to that, she could psychically blind Omar and walk out of here with as much as she could carry. It isn't the ethics of the situation that bother her. She has, after all, made a practice of ordering every patron of the Hellfire Club who asks her for a private dance to empty his (or her) wallet. But that strikes her as no less than those people are asking for; if they are going to use her to satisfy their lust, she might as well use them to satisfy her avarice. A little quid pro quo, with those who can well afford it. A few more weeks of this, and she might be ready to make a down payment on that breast augmentation.

But using her mental powers to steal a bottle of champagne – quite aside from the tawdriness of it – just doesn't seem sporting. Still, she could take a few of those airline-size mini-liquor bottles and fit them into the top of her boot, or. . .And then, as she leans over to examine the contents of the shelf, Emma realizes that the man in the fedora is looking at her.

This, in itself, is more than expected. Emma Frost has gone to a good deal of trouble to make herself worth looking at, from the platinum-blonde dye in her hair, to the nose job Daddy had paid for, as a matter of course, on her sixteenth birthday (when she still let him pay for things), to the foundation garments – as expensive as everything else she currently owns, put together – that will have to do until she gets around to the other surgery. It must be obvious that she is wearing very little, under this coat, and it should come as no surprise to find a strange man's eyes on her. And yet. . .

Emma bends down to touch a bottle on the lower shelf, stretching her legs in a way that emphasizes her ass, the one physical feature in which she has total confidence. For all the babble she has heard about leg men, and breast men, she knows for a fact that there's no substitute for a tight, small, but just so slightly round ass when it comes to getting men to think about actually fucking you. Not that she tends to fuck these men; it's simply that getting them into that mental place is the best way to get their defenses down.

Emma lifts a plastic bottle of rum from the shelf. She turns it around. It has a sailboat on it. It might be worth drinking if she had some kind of parasite in her gut that she wanted to kill.

She doesn't have to look to know that the man is watching her. But. . .

Emma slams the bottle down and whirls on him. "Why are you are looking at my face?"

He steps back, spreads his hands and tilts up the fedora, showing her his eyes. "I'm sorry. I thought you were. . ." He pulls the scarf down, showing a thin black moustache and a well-trimmed beard. Shaking his head, he says, "Never mind. I thought you were someone I knew."

Emma snorts and turns back to the shelf, but her mind is racing. Because he is someone _she_ knows. This is New York City, where rock stars and billionaires wander the streets, masquerading as human beings. Rock stars, billionaires, and superheroes: Anthony Stark is two of these, and he is standing two feet away from Emma Frost, checking her out, as she thinks, _There must be a way I can use this._

She turns her back to the man and pretends to be perusing the selections of bargain-basement liquor, but actually, she is listening to Tony Stark rummage through the contents of his brain. _Adrienne Frost's younger sister who isn't Cordelia,_ he thinks. _Goneril. No, obviously, not Goneril. Regan – is Wyngarde's daughter. It's not that, then, but it's something like that. Rosalind? Hermione? That's the the wrong track, not Shakespeare, but he knows it's the name of a book. Pamela? No, she's not a Pamela, and Justine is very much the wrong kind of book. Clarissa, maybe, or –_

"Emma!" She whirls on him, not able to stand it any longer.

He snaps his fingers and points. "Yes, of course! You're Winston Frost's. . ."

"I'm not Daddy's anything!" she retorts. But he smiles at her instinctive use of the rich-girl endearment. Honestly, she thinks, disgusted with herself. What self-respecting independent woman says, 'Daddy'? Angry at herself, Emma squares her shoulders and lashes out at Stark. "Even if I were, how does that give you the right to smile at me in that fashion? You may have been in my father's home to do business, on occasion, but you hardly qualify as a friend."

"All right, all right." He steps back from her, still smiling, and Emma grabs at the thoughts running through his mind -- amusement, mostly, at the contrast between her haughty words and her less-than-dignified appearance. "Where are you headed?" he asks, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. "Going to a costume party as a dancer at the Hellfire Club?"

"I am going to work," she answers, with all the dignity she can muster, "as a dancer at the Hellfire Club." There, she has said it, and he can like it or not, as he sees fit.

Stark's eyes widen, and he whistles. "I've heard of teenage rebellion, but this –-"

Emma, standing straight, in her spike heels, is every bit as tall as Stark. She thrusts her very well-supported breasts in his direction and says, "I am not a teenager."

"No," he agrees. His eyes run down her body, and back to the blonde hair. He considers how much she has changed from the modest, sullen girl who hung back in the shadows while he made deals with her father and cast half an eye on her oldest sister. "So –" Tony drawls, as Emma looks a challenge at him, "I suppose you're going to show something to old Winston by seducing Sebastian Shaw and becoming White Queen of the Hellfire Club?"

Hearing one's most secret and fondest wish repeated out loud, however noble and reasonable that wish might be, is often enough to bring on vague feelings of shame. Hearing said wish repeated in the tone Stark now uses – as though it is both obvious and utterly trivial – could provoke cooler minds than Emma's to anger. Placing her hands on her hips, she hisses, "I should want to do what instead? Put on a metal suit and fly around with a circus troupe of masked fools?"

Tony's eyes widen and he laughs. "I wouldn't know. I'm not an Avenger. I just pay their bills."

"Is that a fact -- Iron Man?"

"Iron Man's identity is a matter of national security," he says smoothly. He must have this conversation a hundred times a week. "However, I will be happy to pass on your sentiments, next time I see him." His eyes pass up and down her body again, stopping where her bare legs meet the bottom of the coat. "He will be crushed to know he was insulted by a go-go dancer who wants to be a chess piece."

Tony turns on his heel and walks to the door, and Emma would have to concede that he has the winning exit line, except. . ."You're not leaving," she calls. He stops but doesn't look back. "You haven't bought anything yet."

Now he looks, slowly, her way. "Who says I was buying?"

"Why," Emma responds, evenly, "would Tony 'champagne and starlets' Stark, come to a liquor store on Valentine's Night, to look at drinks he doesn't want to buy and talk to women he doesn't want to –? " She stops, because she's almost late for work as it is, and what Tony does or doesn't want to do with her shouldn't even be on the table.

He crosses his arms and leans back against the shelf. "Isn't the answer obvious? It's because he has plenty of both at home."

But he doesn't, Emma realizes, and it takes her a second to realize that she isn't reading his mind. She eases into it, but by the time she gets there, she is only learning what she already knows. In the past week, Tony Stark has thrown away all of the alcohol in his house, because he – playboy and genius and entrepreneur and ironclad hero – has the vague but gnawing suspicion that his life would be better without it. He has come in here, planning to look at the bottles and walk away from them, to show himself that he can. But now he has happened on Emma, and he thinks that perhaps if he can take a woman home, he won't need a drink.

And the simple prospect of a man with money and influence who might help Emma get ahead is suddenly proving to be far from simple.

Emma steps around him, toward the door. "I need to go to work."

"Call in sick." She freezes in her tracks, and stands still as he approaches from behind and puts his hand on her shoulder. "You could call in twisted, I suppose. But I understand Shaw likes them that way."

"If I call in," she answers, working to keep her voice steady, "what should I do then?"

"Come back to my house," he answers, his lips moving close to her ear. "Go to bed with me."

Emma shakes him off and jerks away. "I'm not a whore."

"Good." He nods slowly, that infernal smile. "I don't pay for sex. We'll get along well."

"You don't --" Emma steps back, eyes him coolly. He's joking, of course, about the whole thing. Or he'll say it's a joke, unless she happens to take him seriously. Emma understands the difference between what people think and what they say. She also understands the difference between what they admit to themselves and what they really believe. "You don't do anything _but_ pay for sex, Mister Stark. Every cubic centimeter of that carefully crafted image. Everything you wear, everything you buy or finance, every time your picture is in the newspaper. That hat and that moustache that you think makes you look like Clark Gable or William Powell, when you're more like a slightly higher-end Burt Reynolds? Every dime you pour into one of your inventions. Every time you go out flying in that absurd red and gold suit –"

He's watching her steadily, throughout the rant, struggling to keep from smiling, until she mentions the armor. "I told you, Emma," he says evenly. "I'm not Iron Man.'

"Bull_shit_," she answers, and when she speaks, her confidence has nothing to do with the thought she has just found, his memory of the visceral thrill of flying through the air, breaking the surly bonds of Earth. She doesn't need that to know. "No one else could be Iron Man, because there is no way on God's earth that a man like you builds a toy like that and lets someone else fly around in it."

As she speaks, Tony stares at her, and she hears him think that he has come up with every way to deny his identity, but he has absolutely no answer for that. "You're hired."

"I told you, I don't –"

"If you'll let me finish -- you're hired to run my East Coast operations if you want. Because I can already tell you're about fifty times smarter than my entire Board of Directors. What do you say?"

It's a joke, of course, the same way that the proposition is a joke -- which means it isn't, really. This is one of the great legends of American business, the man with an eye for talent who grabs a worker of genius but no prospects and plucks him (always him, isn't it?) out of the mail room. Tony isn't really offering her a corner office and a seven figure salary right out of the gate. But he's every bit as serious about admiring her brains as he is in his appreciation for her body. This is what she's been looking for, a legitimate way in. And Tony Stark isn't Sebastian Shaw. He won't make her dance for it. Besides. He's Iron Man.

He's one of the good guys.

"I say. . ." Emma lets the trenchcoat fall from her breasts a little. She feels Stark's eyes on her, putting some sway in her hip as she walks toward the champagne display, with its pyramid of bottles. _If I take her home,_ he is thinking, _I don't need a drink. I wake up in the morning with a clear head. I wake up in the morning with someone I owe something to. I wake up with a smart woman who understands me, who I don't have to keep secrets from. A woman who could change my life. Isn't it about time I stopped getting in my own way and gave someone a chance to do that?_ Emma stops in front of the champagne, turns back to him, and flashes her most brilliant smile. _Oh God, but she's beautiful,_ he thinks, and just as Emma feels the heat rise to her face, this unexpected pleasure of being so admired by a man who knows something about women, the rest of his thoughts fall together in a torrent. _She's beautiful, she understands me, I'll fuck this up, I'll let her down, better to flirt your way out of this one, buy a bottle of something and take it home and forget all about this in the morning. Unless. . ._

"I say," Emma answers, leveling her eyes at him, "that I'll take my chances with the Hellfire Club." It isn't that she expects anything better from Sebastian. It's that he'll never give her any reason to.

Tony shrugs, smiles -- it's all a joke now, and he thinks, almost at the same time, _Thank God_ and _Too bad,_ and _I'd better get out of here_ and _I need a drink._ "Your loss," he grins.

"Oh, hardly." Emma reaches into the case and picks up a bottle of champagne. "I'll take my chances with the Hellfire Club, but tonight I'll call in sick." His eyes follow her hand to the bottle, then travel from the bottle to her breasts. He looks as though he might be about to object. "What?" she asks. "If you have me, you don't need the champagne? Is what you're thinking?"

He takes the bottle from her, then reaches with his other hand and picks one vermouth and one vodka up by the necks. "Believe me, I'll be very happy with both." He reaches down to pull the coat around her shoulder, then stops to give her one long hard look. "Emma Frost, I swear. It's almost like you can read my mind."


End file.
